SYDNEY, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Lower back pain affects 540 million people worldwide but patients are getting inappropriate tests and treatments including opioids and surgery, according to a latest Australian-led research.
"The majority of cases of lower back pain respond to simple physical and psychological therapies that keep people active and enable them to stay at work," Melbourne-based Monash University's Professor Rachelle Buchbinder, who led an international group of authors in a series of research papers highlighting the issue, said in a media release from medical journal The Lancet on Thursday.
"Often, however, it is more aggressive treatments of dubious benefit that are promoted and reimbursed."
Evidence suggests that low back pain should be managed in primary healthcare, with the first line of treatment being education and advice for patients to keep active and at work, said the journal, which published the researchers' findings.
But "a high proportion of patients worldwide are treated in emergency departments, encouraged to rest and stop work, are commonly referred for scans or surgery or prescribed pain killers including opioids, which are discouraged for treating low back pain," it said.
Low back pain is a growing global problem that affects all age groups and is generally associated with sedentary occupations, smoking, obesity, and low socioeconomic status.
The researchers reviewed evidence from high and low-income countries that suggested many of the mistakes of high-income countries were well established in low-income and middle-income ones. Rest was frequently recommended to patients in low and middle-income countries, and resources to modify workplaces were scarce, they found.
"In many countries, painkillers that have limited positive effect are routinely prescribed for low back pain, with very little emphasis on interventions that are evidence based such as exercises. As lower-income countries respond to this rapidly rising cause of disability, it is critical that they avoid the waste that these misguided practices entail," said series author Professor Nadine Foster from Keele University in the U.K.
The "global burden" of low back pain is projected to increase further in the coming decades, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries, wrote the authors.
